Our living situation in the village

When we arrived at Chikinumbu village we stayed in newly built 'bush house' (a house made out of bush materials), but after a couple of nights we moved to another house as this new house was full of biting ants, and we couldn't sit or do anything without being constantly bitten! So in Chikinumbu, where we lived for 5 of the 7 weeks, we stayed with a married couple, Peter and Fransiska. This the house we stayed in at Chikinumbu:

The village was quite big. There was a long path going from one end to the other as you can see in the picture below.

When we stayed in Mangijangut for two weeks we stayed with Kathryn and Patrick and their very active 2 and a half year old, Raylene. We didn't cart our food with us to that village, so we ate whatever Kathryn cooked for us - a lot of pumpkin, fish and sago, and the occasional meat as mentioned in a previous post.

The bedroom we stayed in at their house had a ceiling which was just about my height. If I stood up straight, my head touched the ceiling, along with the cobwebs, so I kept my head down mostly. We also had rats living in the ceiling and they got active after dark, squeaking and running around making loud noises. I was blessed with being able to filter the noises out and get a good sleep. Here's a photo of the house in Mangijangut:

When we were at Chikinumbu we cooked for ourselves mainly (over a fire) and sometimes we ate local food that someone cooked for us.

We had a nice big room at Chikinumbu. The picture below shows our beds, but behind me was quite a bit of space. The room was about double the size of what you can see in this photo. My bed is the one closest to the camera.